Spring awards honor undergraduates

Finely tuned research skills and outstanding academic record earned Brittany Kemp a place among the 45 undergraduates honored April 25 with academic or leadership awards and inductions into honor societies at the Spring Undergraduate Awards.

A junior with a double major in Psychology and Sociology, Kemp received the H. Samuel Case ’63, M.Ed. ’66, and Susan Snodgrass Case ’65, M.Ed. ’84, Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research. This year marks a decade since their classmates established the award in honor of Sam and Susan Case. Sam Case served as professor of Exercise Science & Physical Education and provost. He retired in 2004 after 39 years at the college. Susan Case taught language arts in Carroll County and serves as an adjunct lecturer in the college’s Education department and mentor to student teachers.

The first recipient of the Case award in 2001, Blair Elizabeth Heinke, recently completed a three-year residency in Beth Israel’s Family Medicine Program in New York City. Heinke graduated summa cum laude in 2003 with honors in Biology and Biochemistry. A four-year track/cross country runner at McDaniel, she received her M.D. from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in Brooklyn and has participated in the NYC Marathon and the Boston Marathon, the latter as recently as April 19.

“Running continues to play a huge role in my life,” Heinke recently wrote in an e-mail, explaining that running sparked her interest in sports medicine as well as her choice of residency. After graduation from the Beth Israel residency program in June, she heads south for a Primary Care Sports Medicine fellowship with the University of South Carolina Gamecocks.

This year’s Case honoree, Brittany Kemp, was nominated by Psychology department acting chair Wendy Morris. Kemp designed and is conducting capstone research in psychology and is preparing to do a second rigorous research project in sociology during her senior year. She is investigating the effects of perceived controllability of marital status on perceptions of single adults and exploring how the participants’ own marital status and personal satisfaction with their current relationship predicts how positively or negatively they view married and single people.

“Brittany’s research has been conducted diligently and creatively with the goal of ‘expanding one’s understanding of man’s place in the universe,’” Morris wrote in her nomination. “For both social and evolutionary reasons, people pay attention to and place a great deal of importance on the marital status of others. Brittany’s research has and will continue to answer the important questions of how people’s perceptions and stereotypes of others are influenced by marital status, gender, perceived controllability of marital status, and the romantic relationship satisfaction of the perceiver.”